Today i felt much better. Still dodgy of tummy, but not sick, so off i went on the Ebike to work. It was freezing! Even with Pauls super wind proof gloves my hands were sore and numb by the first set of traffic lights and I must have looked quite funny banging my hands on the handlebars to warm them up as I rode.
Today I had the day really well planned. The first lesson was looking at the difference between thirteen and thirty, fourteen and forty etc. This is something the children find really hard but they all did fabulously and I have introduced sweets as a prize for the person who collects the most number of cards. Today was Jeffrey, which was lovely as it meant it wasn’t always Jasper who won – but I did have to get Jasper a second prize pretty quickly to stop any sulking! I hope to take some photos of the school and the students at some point for the blog.
The second lesson was all about the word ‘where’ and we did a rhyme at the start called ‘here is the bee hive’ it has actions so they loved it but Jasper decided it was too easy and messed around a bit until I asked him to show everyone else how it was done. Jade joined in and helped me at this point too as Barry was becoming very difficult poking others. Eventually Barry stole Jasper’s bag from under his desk so I had to make him stand in a corner, there’s no rules about how you discipline here but me looking furious and chucking him in the corner was enough to make him first tearfully apologise then sulk.
The final lesson was difficult. Other students of their age join Jasper, Jeffrey, Becky and Barry but none of them have learnt English before. They are called Robert, Tenny, Steven and JoJo and mostly won’t speak at all. It was hard to have Jasper nattering away to me in English while they were still trying to sort out ‘good afternoon teacher’.
The final lesson of the day was just Becky as Jasper is moving to Shanghai tomorrow  Becky and I had fun and she likes to think she is teaching me so I let her tell me a word in Chinese and make her laugh when I try to say it, then she has to tell me what it means in English. I hope this is helping to bond the two languages for her and make her realise the links between the languages as well as the fact that I don’t speak Chinese!
The way home today was rubbish. As I stayed onto help Becky one to one it was almost 5 and that is the worst time to travel. The roads were so crowded and even the little shortcut Vincent found me has been discovered by lots more people.
At home I found Vincent had got the bug I was nearly over so we didn’t eat much for dinner and got an early night, after some hurried lesson prep for tomorrow where I thought it had lost everything in one of the computer crashes but found enough of it to cobble it back together in time, phew!
According to my contract I was meant to be paid to day and although I subtly brought it up ‘you look cold.’ ‘well, I’ll buy a new coat with my first wages...’ Subtle huh? Didn’t work!